Chloe Irla

Title

Chloe Irla

Location

Baltimore
Maryland

Artist Statement

I maintain an interdisciplinary studio practice grounded in both traditional and alternative approaches to painting and drawing. My recent work investigates the data visualization of increments over specific time periods. I collect information within an established time constraint and then analyze the data set. Based on the conceptual direction of the project, I incorporate the use of textiles and digital media to visualize the research.

The Year One series is based on one year’s worth of data collected about my daughter’s first year of life. From January 18, 2015 to January 18, 2016, I tracked the times of each nursing session, pumping session, nightly sleep and morning wake-up, daytime nap, diaper, bath, bottle, and solid food acceptance. My initial goal was to create wool blankets based on the graph-like data visualizations, but as a new parent, I simply do not have the time to dedicate to hand-felting and sewing large-scale quilts at this point in my practice. I decided to utilize digital media to create the compositions, so my process began with hand-dyeing samples of wool, scanning the samples and adjusting them into digital files, and then arranging the “tiles” into blanket-like digital compositions.

Year One allows me to compare data about my daughter’s growth and development, and also visualizes the absolute time commitment that goes into being a primary caregiver. Every hour of the day with an infant is busy, and with this project, each hour is also accounted for. I can compare my daughter’s first month of life to the last month of her first year, which shows a drastic difference in feeding and sleeping routines. The overall appearance of the compositions is similar to my initial goal of creating handmade wool blankets, but the process is much better suited to my busy, primary caregiving lifestyle.

Collection

Citation

“Chloe Irla,” Artist Parent Index , accessed March 29, 2024, https://www.artistparentindex.com/items/show/109.

Output Formats

Item Relations

This item has no relations.

Geolocation